South Koreans have painstakingly planned out the details ahead of North Korea's Kim Jong Un and South Korea's Moon Jae-in's summit at their shared border Friday, the culmination of a flurry of diplomacy over the past few months.
It's happening inside the buffer zone on the border known as the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, at Panmunjom — the already-historic site of the signing of the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting in the Korean War. The meeting is the first between Korean leaders in more than a decade.
"For a long time this area has been used essentially as a tourist destination," said J. Elise Van Pool, a spokesperson for U.S. Forces Korea.
On Friday, that changes. In a moment made for the cameras that will be livestreaming for the world to see, Kim Jong Un is planning to walk over the military demarcation line that has divided the peninsula for 65 years. He will be the first North Korean leader to do so.
Together Kim and Moon will walk to the Peace House, a three-story, gray stone structure built with high-profile summits in mind. As construction workers furiously worked on a renovation in advance of Friday, reporters weren't let in to get a look.
"On the first level there's meeting rooms for lower level delegates, and then a larger meeting on the second level for heads of state type talks. On the third floor they have a dining room [where] luncheons and dinners can be held," Van Pool described.
Workers changed the meeting room itself, to include symbolic nods to unity. They put up a painting of North Korea's Mount Kumkang. They built a new table designed to look like two bridges coming together. Even the seating is significant — the two leaders are to sit exactly 2,018 millimeters (79.4 inches) apart.
The agenda includes denuclearization, though definitions of that vary; arriving at some sort of peace framework since the Korean War is technically not over; and improving inter-Korean ties. Cameras will be allowed to stream the first handshake, a scheduled tree planting and a dinner banquet at the end of the day.
"Look, there's a role for spectacle in international diplomacy," says Danny Russel, a vice president at the Asia Society think tank and the top East Asia diplomat for the Obama administration.
"Clearly, we're in a charm offensive and Kim Jong Un is seeking to achieve an effect. Which is, he's now ready to shift gears and turn to cooperation, turn to economic development and perhaps he's not positioning himself as a responsible party," Russel said.
Russel says the outcome of this summit will be a foundation for what happens at the next one, between Kim and President Trump.
"The impression that President Moon Jae-in forms from that face-to-face encounter is going to be fed back to Washington and to President Trump along with other insights," Russel says.
And all of this is happening at Panmunjom. For the first time the Peace House is being used by heads of state for its original purpose — to try to make peace.
"It's a good thing to remind people what this area is truly meant for: to have talks and to maybe one day resolve the conflict on the Korean peninsula," Van Pool says.
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